Kolkata – a natural bulwark against divisive politics?

I was fortunate to meet James Bradbury, a PhD student from Manchester University, when he was doing field studies in and around Kolkata a few years ago. Within a few months, James became reasonably proficient in Bangla and made lots of friends here. Clearly, he was learning not just from printed letters; he was trying to understand the city through experiential learning.

Today, I happened to re-read one of his essays. On 14 September 2020, James wrote this about Kolkata: 

“Once the seat of power in colonial India, Kolkata has once again moved to the center of the nation’s political life. Now, it is integral to a struggle to define the Indian nation. What engenders this struggle in the first place is arguably Kolkata’s living repository of experiences, memories, and ideas—everything that the city preserves and that contradicts the BJP’s political agenda. This political tradition is kept alive in the chatter of the city’s coffee houses, tea shops, and campuses, and lodged in the collective memories of independence, displacement, resettlement, and renewal.

“And it is indeed fragile. As the BJP’s electoral juggernaut rolls eastward, it will inevitably alter Kolkata’s political culture: Hindu nationalism will play a greater role in coming years, stirring up underlying religious tensions and politicizing questions of citizenship and belonging along the border. But this vision of India will also face a natural bulwark in the refugee megacity, where some voters and activists will stubbornly adhere to their time-honed ideas and reject attempts to rule them by sowing divisions. Kolkata may, in this process, rekindle some of the rebellious energy that has characterized its history. In its midst, it continues to shelter ideas that were important to India’s nation-making past, and which are likely to re-emerge in one form or another to shape its future.”

The result of the recent election in West Bengal has flummoxed pundits of all persuations. Except for Prashant Kishore and – I can say now – James Bradbury, NOBODY could foresee the future in such clear terms. Kolkata has indeed rekindled “some of the rebellious energy that has characterized its history.”

As a social scientist, James Bradbury shows tremendous prescience to predict what has been happening in Bengal today. Take a bow, James!

I would strongly recommend that you invest a little time to read it. If you do, you shall get some clarity about the history of West Bengal and also a partial answer to the question why a state with such a large population of Hindu refugees uprooted by Muslims have always kept communal political parties like the Hindu Mahasabha, Jan Sangh, and now BJP, at arm’s length. Happy reading!

Here’s the link to the essay. 

21 May 2021

The Digital Divide

The graphic above is true and so sad! If anything shows our government’s complete indifference – if not disdain – for ordinary people, it is the COWIN app. Our rulers have made internet access almost a precondition for the life-saving vaccination against COVID-19. The poor in India don’t get anything easily, from ration card to medical aid. Now, a vast majority of them who don’t have internet access have an even bigger handicap vis-à-vis the vaccine.

However, India was not like this always. When I was a child, once a year, our whole family would visit a nearby corporation office for the small-pox vaccine to be administered with a bifurcated needle that would make two parallel punctures. It was open and free to all and the government advertised it widely to encourage people to get vaccinated. In fact, the efforts were much more than mere publicity. The University of Michigan Library website says:

“[In India in 1974] During a six-day period each month, health workers visited every one of the country’s 100 million households. Supervised by about fifty international advisors and an equal number of Indian officials, some thirty-three thousand district health personnel and more than 100,000 additional field workers conducted house-to-house searches in a total of 575,721 villages and 2,641 cities.”

Clearly, a much poorer India had wiser and better educated leadership that invested scarce resources into public health programmes thanks to which India has been able to kill to demons: small pox and polio. The second graphic has captured our past beautifully.

But today, we have a government run by idiots with phoney degrees and charlatans who promote unscientific, so-called ayurvedic cures so that fellow crooks can make a quick buck even in the middle of a devastating pandemic. More importantly, the government invested nothing except on the 3^rd stage clinical trial of the vaccine developed by the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) and Bharat Biotech. Even Covaxin, the vaccine jointly developed by ICMR, they didn’t license to other manufacturers. Contrarily, the Russian Sputnik-V vaccine is going to be manufactured by six companies in India. Why did the government restrict production of Covaxin to only a small Hyderabad-based private company? If you know the answer, please tell me. Questions galore. Why do the owners of the biggest vaccine manufacturer Serum Institute of India have to run away to England when they should try to augment their manufacturing capacity to help millions of Indians?

Since the middle of 2020 the USA (even under a madman president) and Europe have been investing heavily into private companies for researching vaccines; many governments bought millions of doses of vaccine much before they were tested or produced. But our government ignored warnings from the scientific community about an impending second wave and didn't pre-book a single dose of the vaccine. What were they doing with the thousands of crores reportedly received in the completely opaque PM Care Fund if they didn’t utilise it for vaccines?

Our government has messed up every aspect of the problem whether making digital access a priority or the pricing of the vaccine or the age-group to which it should be given first. It has come out with a series of seemingly random decisions which has helped none. But these acts of stupidity pale into insignificance when you consider that in the humongous machinery called government and its adjuncts like the Niti Ayog, there was nobody to compare the number of vaccines required and the available production capacity in the country. Did they actually forget to do this when they were gleefully celebrating their stupidity as late as in March 2021? Can anything be more bizarre?

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I belong to the privileged minority that has much better access to scarce resources. I personally have access to most of the ladders shown in this graphic. Therefore, anything I write on ordinary people not getting the COVID-19 vaccination would amount to hypocrisy. I accept the charge, but that doesn’t alter facts. We have a bunch of moronic rulers who are destroying the country.

The PM must resign. If ever a national government was needed with the best talents available in the country, it is now.

 18 May 2021

 

The Ganga is a carrier of corpses

 In the Wire yesterday, Deepal Trivedi wrote: 

“A poet from Gujarat once hailed as “the next big icon of Gujarati poetry” by right-leaning litterateurs in the state, has become the latest target of the BJP IT cell’s troll army for a powerful poem she has written on the sufferings of Indians as the Union government grossly mismanages the second wave of the pandemic. …

 

“The 14-line poem was promptly translated into at least six languages, becoming the voice of all Indians who are saddened by the tragedies wrought by the pandemic and angered by the government’s aloofness and mismanagement of the situation.”

I am sharing with you my Bangla translation of the poem from English, followed by the English version by Salil Tripathi, Hindi by Ilyas Sheikh, and finally, the original in Gujarati.

Courtesy: The Wire, from where I have sourced the original and two translations, and also the picture of the poet.

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শববাহিনী গঙ্গা / পারুল খাক্কার  >>>

সারি সারি শবদেহ বলে, খুসী থাকো, কোন কিছু ভাববেনা কেউ।

এ রামরাজ্যে রাজা, মানুষের দেহ নিয়ে বয়ে যায় গঙ্গার ঢেউ।

হে রাজন, জঙ্গলের কাঠ সব ছাই, শ্মশানে তিলমাত্র স্থান নেই

আর্তকে সাহায্য করার লোক নেই, শববাহকের অভাবও একান্তই

শোক করার জন্যই বা আছে কে? আমরা তবুও বেঁচে থাকি

ভাষাহীন নিষ্প্রাণ অবসন্নতা একমাত্র রয়ে যায় বাকী।

 যমদূতেরা নগরীর ঘরে ঘরে, তারা নৃত্য করে মহা উল্লাসে

এ রামরাজ্যে রাজা, সারি সারি শবদেহ গঙ্গায় ভাসে।

হে রাজন, শ্মশানের চিমনিটাকে কাঁপিয়ে দিয়েছে জীবানুর ঝড়,

ভাঙ্গবে অনেক শাঁখা আরো, ভালোবাসা, উত্তোলিত বক্ষপিঞ্জর।

 ঘাতকের তরবারি; প্রজ্জ্বলিত জনপদে পরিশ্রমী নৃপতি বীনা বাজায়

তোমার রামরাজ্যে রাজা, গঙ্গায় সারি সারি শবদেহ ভেসে যায়

ঝকঝকে পোষাক তোমার, মৃদু হাস্যময় তোমার চিবুক

অবশেষে মানুষ দেখেছে তোমার নির্মম, ভয়াবহ মুখ।

 কোন কিন্তু নয় আর, বাইরে এসো, উচ্চকন্ঠে বল বারবার,

“উলঙ্গ রাজা তুমি নির্বোধ! চুপ করে থাকবো না আর।“

বিদ্ধস্ত জনপদ, চিতার আগুন মেঘবর্ত্ম ছুঁয়ে ফেলে প্রায়

 

তুমি কি দেখ না রাজা, গঙ্গায় সারি সারি লাশ বয়ে যায়?

 

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English Translation by Salil Tripathi >>>

 

Don’t worry, be happy, in one voice speak the corpses
O King, in your Ram-Rajya, we see bodies flow in the Ganges

O King, the woods are ashes,
No spots remain at crematoria,
O King, there are no carers,
Nor any pall-bearers,
No mourners left
And we are bereft
With our wordless dirges of dysphoria

Libitina enters every home where she dances and then prances,
O King, in your Ram-Rajya, our bodies flow in the Ganges

O King, the melting chimney quivers, the virus has us shaken
O King, our bangles shatter, our heaving chest lies broken

The city burns as he fiddles, Billa-Ranga thrust their lances,
O King, in your Ram-Rajya, I see bodies flow in the Ganges

O King, your attire sparkles as you shine and glow and blaze
O King, this entire city has at last seen your real face

Show your guts, no ifs and buts,
Come out and shout and say it loud,
“The naked King is lame and weak”
Show me you are no longer meek,
Flames rise high and reach the sky, the furious city rages;
O King, in your Ram-Rajya, do you see bodies flow in the Ganges?

 

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Hindi translation by Ilyas Sheikh >>>

 

एक साथ सब मुर्दे बोले ‘सब कुछ चंगा-चंगा’
साहेब तुम्हारे रामराज में शव-वाहिनी गंगा

ख़त्म हुए शमशान तुम्हारे, ख़त्म काष्ठ की बोरी
थके हमारे कंधे सारे, आँखें रह गई कोरी
दर-दर जाकर यमदूत खेले
मौत का नाच बेढंगा
साहेब तुम्हारे रामराज में शव-वाहिनी गंगा

नित लगातार जलती चिताएँ
राहत माँगे पलभर
नित लगातार टूटे चूड़ियाँ
कुटती छाति घर घर
देख लपटों को फ़िडल बजाते वाह रे ‘बिल्ला-रंगा’
साहेब तुम्हारे रामराज में शव-वाहिनी गंगा

साहेब तुम्हारे दिव्य वस्त्र, दैदीप्य तुम्हारी ज्योति
काश असलियत लोग समझते, हो तुम पत्थर, ना मोती
हो हिम्मत तो आके बोलो
‘मेरा साहेब नंगा’
साहेब तुम्हारे रामराज में शव-वाहिनी गंगा

 

The original in Gujarati >>>

 

એક અવાજે મડદાં બોલ્યાં ‘સબ કુછ ચંગા-ચંગા’
રાજ, તમારા રામરાજ્યમાં શબવાહિની ગંગા.
રાજ, તમારા મસાણ ખૂટયા, ખૂટયા લક્કડભારા,
રાજ, અમારા ડાઘૂ ખૂટયા, ખૂટયા રોવણહારા,
ઘરેઘરે જઈ જમડાંટોળી કરતી નાચ કઢંગા
રાજ, તમારા રામરાજ્યમાં શબવાહિની ગંગા.
રાજ, તમારી ધગધગ ધૂણતી ચીમની પોરો માંગે,
રાજ, અમારી ચૂડલી ફૂટે, ધડધડ છાતી ભાંગે
બળતું જોઈ ફીડલ વગાડે ‘વાહ રે બિલ્લા-રંગા’!
રાજ, તમારા રામરાજ્યમાં શબવાહિની ગંગા.
રાજ, તમારા દિવ્ય વસ્ત્ર ને દિવ્ય તમારી જ્યોતિ
રાજ, તમોને અસલી રૂપે આખી નગરી જોતી
હોય મરદ તે આવી બોલો  ‘રાજા મેરા નંગા’
રાજ, તમારા રામરાજ્યમાં શબવાહિની ગંગા.